Diptych

Chapter 16

Even with Lupin laid up in the hospital wing, the days passed as they always had. The Gryffindors were especially fraught, and talks of the school remaining closed after Christmas picked up, but everybody around Regulus went back to their usual routines, and he had no choice but to follow suit. Talk over breakfast turned to homework and plans for the holidays, and Regulus allowed himself to be once more preoccupied with the idea of the Dark Lord, and when the next meeting might be. Before he'd wrongly questioned his trust in Tom, he'd agreed that he ought to ask the man about taking the mark, and what that might mean for him. With the distraction of the latest petrification fading, he no longer had any excuse not to. But his nights were still filled with notes meant for Tom and something stopped him from putting ink to parchment whenever he tried at the breakfast table. If it wasn't the lingering feeling of being watched by Professors Slughorn and Dumbledore, it was the sight of his brother fading away before his very eyes.

Sirius clearly wasn't doing very well in the wake of his friend's ordeal, solemn and paler than usual. He wasn't his usual animated self at meal times, and not even Potter's constant prodding and poking seemed able to pull him from his misery. In truth, the last time Regulus had seen Sirius in such a state was that last summer he'd been living at Grimmauld Place. The only difference was that he was now not privy to the outbursts he was sure his brother was having when the emotions he was failing to keep under wraps came to a head.

One such morning when Regulus was staring over at the Gryffindor table, his attention was suddenly stolen by a small envelope fluttering down before him. He didn't recognise the owl that dropped it, or the hand that his name was written in. But there his name was, overly-curled and slightly wobbly as though the hand that wrote it had shaken as it did. Could it be the Dark Lord's handwriting? It wasn't as he imagined it, but that was the only person that sprang to his mind as he carefully tore open the envelope, tucking the card enclosed beneath the table lest any of his housemates be looking his way. Tom had pointed out how important loyalty would be to the Dark Lord, and Regulus didn't want to risk spoiling that before he even had a chance to prove that he could be trusted.

Professor Dumbledore humbly requests your presence in his office at the following time:

11am

The first part was printed in black, clearly not written by Professor Dumbledore himself but by one of those muggle typing things, and Regulus suspected that he had a whole stack of the cards on his desk for whenever he chose to summon students. It hadn't occurred to him until that moment that Dumbledore would do that, and he counted himself lucky that this was his first such invitation. The time beneath the request was written in blue, and was just as shaky as his name had been on the envelope. He had to look back to his name twice to be sure the owl hadn't accidentally dropped the card into the lap of the wrong person. He couldn't fathom what Professor Dumbledore could possibly want with him, and yet it would explain why he had been paying attention to Regulus for the first time in his life. Perhaps he wanted to see if Regulus could cheer up his brother. If that was the case, he clearly didn't know either brother particularly well.

Obviously, despite his reservations, Regulus was pacing the corridor at the bottom of the stairwell at 10:45. He might have been distrustful of his Headmaster, and he might have been worried about what he would ask him, but that didn't change the fact that Regulus had been asked to be there, and so there he was. He was just contemplating whether it was appropriate to give a knock on the gargoyle's head guarding the headmaster's office or to call up to him when the entire staircase began to shift. Regulus felt it in the ground before he saw it, a heavy shift, and then the turning of the stairs. Given that there was nobody else at the bottom, and that it was fairly close to the time he'd been instructed to be there, Regulus could only assume that was his invitation up.